Boris Akunin: Russia’s Dissident Detective Novelist

Grigory Chkhartishvili has his best ideas in the morning. When he first wakes up, the fifty-six-year-old writer—who, under the pseudonym Boris Akunin, is one of Russia’s most widely read contemporary authors—might think of a new predicament in which to ensnare his popular hero, Erast Fandorin, the dashing nineteenth-century detective who can see into people’s souls and always wins at games of chance. (Locked in a cellar by a pint-sized lord of Moscow’s criminal underworld known as “Little Misha”? Bested in a ship’s salon by a pregnant French psychopath posing as a gutbürgerlich Swiss questing for a trove of priceless Indian emeralds? Tricked by the butler out of winning the heart of Romanov princess Xenia?)

Before his first cup of coffee, Akunin might hit on a solution to one of these predicaments (An arsenal of traditional Japanese weapons hidden in the crutches of Fandorin’s impeccable beggar disguise; a very ugly grandfather clock that falls on the pregnant psychopath just as she pulls the trigger, causing her to miss, but not miscarry; alas, to the last, there is no solution. Fandorin loses the princess).

The Fandorin novels, which first appeared in 1998, have sold thirteen million copies in Russia. They’ve been adapted for television and film, and have made their author well known and wealthy. The books are delightful romps through a stylized late nineteenth century—so much fun that one readily forgives the sometimes harebrained plot twists that, following closely one on another, are part of what make them so hard to put down. One Russian magazine editor wrote that he refuses to read any more Fandorin novels, likening the experience to being hooked to a catheter: once you open a book, you have no choice but to ingest the whole thing, immediately.

But in recent months—ever since the novelist became a driving force in the anti-Putin protests—his early-morning planning might well concern politics rather than art.

With his metal-rimmed glasses and introvert’s posture—shoulders up, head forward— Akunin might, in the hands of a caricaturist, look very much Kenneth Grahame’s sympathetic Mole; while not an Adonis like Fandorin, Akunin does share his hero’s “piercing” blue gaze. In the deep-blue study in his Old Moscow apartment, not far from the Kremlin, he recently described to me his dizzying and unexpected entry into political life.

When it was announced last fall that Putin would resume the Presidency, Akunin thought it was finally time for him to emigrate from Russia: the country now truly belonged to Putin, and there was no place for the intelligentsia. But with the street protests that followed the December 4th parliamentary elections, his feelings changed. From his house in Brittany, he drove to Paris and bought a ticket for the next flight to Moscow. At the airport, he wrote on his blog that he was on his way home, and his political career began. The next day, he was one of the first—and some say, best—speakers at the December 10th rally on Bolotnaya Square, possessed of a soft-spoken moral authority. “He is not a professional politician,” said Yuri Saprykin, a journalist and member of the winter protests’ organizing committee. “He’s a person who didn’t look for power, or a place in the political system. He is moved by his moral values, and everybody sees that.”

Next he took part in organizing the huge antigovernment protest that took place on December 24th, attended, despite the winter holidays and bitter cold, by tens of thousands. He also conducted a conversation with the charismatic opposition leader Alexey Navalny, whose right-wing leanings make liberals like Akunin nervous. In the discussion, which he posted on his blog, Akunin confronted Navalny about his political views in the wake of the activist’s participation in the nationalist “Russia March” demonstration. In the months that followed, Akunin supported actions like the “Big White Circle,” in which Muscovites held hands in ten-mile ring around the city, and helped organize a grass-roots call for a referendum in Moscow.

Shortly after Putin was sworn in for his third term as President, earlier this year, Akunin—who was back in France, where he does most of his writing—woke up with the idea of taking a walk with some friends through the Russian capital, stopping by the statues of their favorite poets. After all, he reasoned, why would they need a permit for that? He had just watched the inauguration on television: “Moscow was this Kafka-esque landscape, with Putin riding across a dead city; the police had chased away people from the streets,” he said. He called up the writers Dmitry Bykov and Ludmila Ulitskaya, and posted the plan to conduct a “test stroll,” to determine if Muscovites could still walk freely around the city, on his blog.

On the appointed Sunday in May, more than ten thousand people met at the Pushkin statue. “They didn’t come for our beautiful eyes,” Akunin said. “I’m not sure they read fiction at all. They came because they are alarmed by what is happening in Russia.”

A demonstration held the day before the inauguration had ended in violence and arrests, but the police left the strollers alone. A few weeks later, on June 6th, however, the Russian Parliament passed a law raising fines for participating in unsanctioned rallies by a hundred and fifty times, to nine thousand dollars, close to an average Russian’s yearly salary. The news the day we met, in June, was the raid on opposition leaders’ apartments that had taken place that morning.

Akunin describes himself as a reluctant political activist, someone who prefers solitude and doesn’t have much faith in human nature. He likened the situation in Russia to the Wild West, where ranchers must band together to hunt down cattle thieves, even if they would rather tend their herds in peace. “We realize, finally, it is our country,” he said. “When something like that happens, if you can do something, you do it, otherwise you feel bad afterward.” Navalny called Akunin’s role in the protest “essential.” In addition to the author’s popularity, “the most important thing about Boris Akunin is his sense of style,” Navalny wrote. “He is the one to feel the atmosphere and catch the agenda, detect it and give it [direction].”

This ability to capture the zeitgeist is, say others, exactly what has made him such a major success. A Japanese scholar by training, Akunin worked at a Moscow literary magazine before he began publishing his own fiction. He was best known for his translations of Yukio Mishima, the celebrated Japanese writer who committed seppuku after a failed attempt at a coup d’etat, in 1970. With “The Winter Queen,” his first Fandorin novel, Akunin effectively reinvented crime fiction in Russia—a totally low-brow genre under the Soviets. Famously, he decided to try his hand at detective novels because his wife liked to read them, but was so embarrassed to be seen with the books on the metro that she would cover them in brown paper.

Akunin injected his potboilers with allusions to Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Conan Doyle, and Christie, to name just a few. Still, the books never take themselves too seriously: Fandorin’s whalebone corset is a model called the Lord Byron (and his romantic exploits are a match for the English poet’s, except that Fandorin is always a gentleman); a femme fatale reads Stendhal (but skips the battle scenes); bandits quote Pushkin; a night-club chanteuse puts lines from Heine to music to reel in johns.

In Fandorin, the writer also invented a new kind of Russian protagonist: an attractive, intelligent, resourceful secret agent who, according to some, bore at least a passing resemblance to the Vladimir Putin of the early aughts. With his nostalgia-tinged portraits of a Russian golden age, Akunin tapped into the reading public’s subconscious desires for stability after the upheaval of the nineties—“literary psychotherapy,” as the critic Lev Danilkin put it.

“It’s interesting that the writer who got all his popularity from Putin’s time is now in the avant-garde of political struggle,” Vasiliy Stepanov, an editor at Séance magazine, said. Several years ago, Séance ran an issue in which some fifty critics, authors, film directors, and journalists expressed their opinions about Akunin’s work. Stepanov posited that, initially, Putin was buoyed by a longing for stability, even at the cost of dictatorship, that dovetailed with the reading public’s interest in Fandorin’s Russia. “Alexander III’s stability was similar to Putin’s stability,” Stepanov said. Fandorin’s charming, orderly, relatively just-minded world isn’t exactly an advertisement for overthrowing the system—a possibility bandied about mostly by violent and occasionally sexy Nihilists, who, along with orphans, serve as a kind of motif in the books. Fandorin himself argues, early on, that democracy subjugates the more talented few to the less talented many.

Akunin says he has always been critical of the Russian political system, but before he was a famous novelist no one cared about his opinions. He is also quick to say that he is nostalgic not for imperial Russia, but for imperial Russia’s literature. ”I think that 19th century Russia, when Fandorin lived, wasn’t ripe for democracy,” Akunin wrote in an e-mail. “Even in 1991 it was probably too early. I do not believe that effective and lasting democracy is possible in a country without a middle class. Now is just the right time. We’ve grown up as a society, we are ready to take responsibility.”

In Fandorin’s Russia, absolute power doesn’t necessarily corrupt—when the right people are in charge, the system works. Nonetheless, over the years, Fandorin suffers a series of disillusionments, finally retiring rather than taking a job at the top in the byzantine hierarchy of the czarist political machine. In later books, the regime grows more and more frail, its emissaries more corrupt. Fandorin goes into exile, even studying engineering in Boston, returning to Moscow now and then to solve cases and save lives (and bail out the monarchy on the eve of Nicholas II’s coronation).

“These are not just interesting detective novels,” Saprykin said. Fandorin, he said, “is not only a servant for the Czar but a person who tries to act like a free individual, with a strong love of his country, but not for his authorities. He criticizes authority and suffers for that. He’s not afraid of it.”

While it is unlikely that, in today’s Russia, Akunin risks becoming a dissident in the style of Tolstoy or Solzhenitsyn, speaking out against the government is not entirely without danger. “It’s very nice of him,” Roman Volobuev, a film critic and editor at the Russian GQ, said. “He had moved to France and was sitting there writing his first serious novel, not a detective story, and he came back to Moscow. He is very smart—and one smart person makes a difference.”

Akunin was afflicted by writer’s block for months after he became involved in the protests, but now, he said, he’s gotten used to the idea that life is bound to be turbulent for some time to come. Most recently, though, he said he believes that “the time of amateurs is over,” and that he will now be supporting the protest activities in his capacities as writer and blogger.

In June, his first “serious” novel came out, under the name Akunin-Chkhartishvili: a philosophically driven five-hundred-page work of fiction about the Russian Revolution that the writer claims, proudly, is unreadable. “After forty novels of running, slugging, and shooting, I’m a real writer now,” he said. The novel was already a best-seller, but there had been few reviews, he said with a grin, because no one could get all the way through it.

Now back in France, Akunin is at work on the fourteenth Fandorin novel. It takes place in 1914, in Baku, during an oil boom. Fandorin, who was twenty when we first met him, is now fifty-eight; in Baku he will encounter revolutionaries, oligarchs, and (naturally) a femme fatale. Akunin mentions that there will be two more Fandorin books after this one. Does that mean that our hero will live through the Russian Revolution? “I don’t know yet,” Akunin said. “I’m still in 1914.”